on false dichotomies and American privilege regarding the tumblr discourse of oppression
This is a response to my post about how UScentric ideas like “white vs POC” have limitations in understanding global racism and oppression, btw as reblogged by this user. I thought it was too long to reblog from there so I have responded here. (Sorry, LAP warning- because I think this poster illustrates well a common trend in how some social justice bloggers think due to US-centrism.)
1. “Out of context”? Every single example I used was about a US tumblr user talking about racism OUTSIDE the US, NOT in the US- and getting it horribly wrong. Like this:
I am an ethnic Chinese btw, and my grandparents lived through both European colonial rule and Japanese imperialism. I think that gives my voice some credibility about global oppression, rather than an American telling me I am “wrong”. I also live in Europe, where far-right and neo-Nazi parties have been gaining strength, where there are plenty of tensions about immigrants. And these neo-Nazis? They absolutely hate Eastern Europeans. Which makes sense if you know how Nazism was more obsessed with murdering other “white people”- like Slavic people who they saw as equally subhuman as Jewish people, and drew up Generalplan Ost, a Slavic version of the Final Solution. So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about or what I have seen. The UK has classism, Islamophobia, racism against non-white people and really, virulent racism against Eastern Europeans coexists alongside all of this. They are not mutually exclusive.
Is this man beaten up for being Polish in the UK like the European neo-Nazi whose definition of genocide is “multiculturalism”? (and believe me, we have A LOT of these bottom feeders here), or the white American complaining how “unfairly hated” they feel over Ferguson?
2. “#these are the kind of things that piss me off #i don’t understand these anti-social justice blogs”
If you think me pointing out examples of global racism and how other forms of oppression like authoritarianism, economic exploitation may not fall neatly in “White vs POC lines” is being “anti-social justice”… you just proved exactly why I had to make that post.
France, 2014, not 1934, unfortunately. Ashkenazi Jewish people can benefit from “white privilege” in the US, but less so in Europe where anti-Semitism has increased with the rise of neo-Nazi groups.
Social justice is all about listening, and you are completely ignoring my perspective as a non-American person talking about global racism by discrediting me as “anti-social justice”. Because only real social justice is the American “White people oppress POC flavour?” So now I’m “anti-social justice” for wanting to say, “hey, yes racism may be “white vs POC” in the US, but it isn’t always elsewhere?“ American political hegemony at work here, guys. Seems uncomfortably like you’re either with us or against us, eh?
It is a FACT that world history is complex, and you shouldn’t be surprised it didn’t ALL fall into “white people = oppressors” and “POC = victims”. So what? All of us non-Americans have to make way for the US-approved “White vs POC” narrative? If it doesn’t fit in, sorry? I suppose the Iraqi Kurds killed by chemical weapons in the 1980s should STFU because their murderers were Iraqi Arabs? These people in the following genocides are “less oppressed” than you? Please, check your American privilege.
1970s: “POC” against “POC”: the Cambodian Genocide under Pol Pot.
1990s: “White people” oppressing other “white people”: Mass grave of Bosnian genocide victims.
2. “#what are they trying to prove #that white supremacy and privledge doesn’t exist”
Oppression is a dynamic between oppressor and oppressed. The oppressor only needs institutional power to oppress. The oppressor therefore cannot experience systemic discrimination because they are in control. The oppressor does not have to be white nor does the victim have to be non-white.
To begin with, are ANY of my examples of “white people” being oppressed in those posts about WHITE AMERICANS being oppressed in the US? Nope, because duh they do have institutional power and therefore cannot suffer institutionalised racism. The Bosnians, Ashkenazi Jewish people and Greeks did not have institutional power in Serbia, Germany and Ottoman Turkey. So, yes, they can suffer from systematic racism, and indeed, actually suffered GENOCIDE even though they are usually considered “White” in the US. Where they were murdered, they had NO PRIVILEGES vis a vis their oppressors.
Also, the Allied POWs who working in conditions of slavery on the Death Railway? The Empire of Japan broke multiple international laws about treatment of POWs, btw. No matter how much propaganda they spewed about Asian “brotherhood” and claimed they were fighting “Western colonialism”, they also treated my family WORSE than the British did. And worse still, the Japanese government denies most of its war crimes today. And they make use of the “White vs POC” narrative, that the poor, oppressed empire of Japan was forced into aggression by Western colonialism. Because that washes the blood of the Nanking Massacre off their hands. How comforting. The same obfuscation used by Turkey today to deny their culpability in the Armenian genocide.
And this isn’t? What a joke, Erdogan.
3. “#also #saying poc are not oppressed undermines history”
Did the victims who would be considered “POC” lIke the Chinese and Uighur Muslims I mentioned in my post not exist? Did you unconsciously miss their oppression because it is at the hands of other non-white people?
“White vs POC” captures US power relations, not global ones where capitalism, history, US foreign policy imperialism, economics, developed vs developing world all play an enormous role IN ADDITION to European colonialism. “White vs POC” obscures the racism in the Rwandan genocide of Hutu against Tutsi. Do you know how many Western governments like the US couldn’t be bothered to intervene in “just another African civil war”? They actively characterised the optics of the situation as “black people killing each other” and ignored how the Hutu extremists called the Tutsis “cockroaches” and said “cut the tall trees” in reference to stereotypes that Tutsi are taller and lankier. See why that the label “POC” is problematic in countries where non-white people are a majority- and is kind of meaningless if it’s supposed to be about solidarity?
A genocide survivor at one of the Rwandan Genocide memorials.
Also, have you ever though how people like you who insist on portraying the most serious oppression as “white vs POC”, btw, are undermining the history of people like my grandparents, three of whom didn’t live to see an apology from the Japanese government in their lifetime for its WW2 war crimes? You are implicitly viewing oppression as a contest if me pointing out real examples of “non-white” imperialism or oppression somehow means “POC are not oppressed”. I didn’t say that. You did. If you think that narratives are monolithic, that who is in power is rigid and not fluid, you really do need to remember the rest of the world doesn’t operate like the US.
Also, I have no idea how talking about the agency and moral culpability non-white citizens in developed countries (like me) have because of our socio-economic privilege somehow became “POC are not oppressed”. It is a fact that there ARE other bigger forces like economic exploitation oppressing people in globally today, not just racism. The Rana Plaza Bangladeshi factory collapse that killed over 1000 Bangladeshi garment workers? The clothing labels found: Primark, Zara, Mango etc. And I have shopped at these places MANY TIMES. Does the fact I am Chinese make me less culpable than my Swiss roommate down the hall with a Zara jacket? Seeing it as white supremacy ignores the more accurate characterisation of “Developed vs Developing world”. Most Americans benefit from US economic, political and cultural hegemony, not ONLY “white” Americans. Is there NO difference between your African-American president and the Pakistani boy whose grandma was killed in a misfired drone strike even though they are both “not white”?
4. “#what are they trying to prove #that white people are guilt-free?”
It’s kind of warped if somehow I cannot mention the stories of Soviet, Greek, Armenian, Bosnian and Jewish victims of internationally-recognised GENOCIDES, because that means I’m absolving “white people” of guilt. By that logic, black Americans cannot talk about slavery because slavery of Africans was first practised by other Africans themselves- so we can completely ignore the fact that most black Americans are obviously descended from the African VICTIMS of the slave trade, not those making money off it?
Former Serbian General, Ratko Mladic, most assuredly “white” architect of the genocide in Bosnia.
Also, I’m not sure how anyone could get the impression that “white people are guilt-free” from my post. When I think I used several examples of “white” people oppressing one another. The Serbians murdering the Bosnians? The Germans murdering European Jews? The owners of serfs in Imperial Russia? WHITE! Pretty sure all these “white” people are as stone-dead guilty as slave-owners and those drunk on Manifest Destiny. All I’m saying is, “white privilege” is a bit hollow to say to the Bosnian survivor. So, are the descendants Soviet POW who almost starved to death under the Nazis’ genocidal POW policies who has immigrated to the US in the 1990s morally responsible for Jim Crow? Did his ancestors benefit from African slavery? It’s you who are referring to them homogenously as “white” and resisting this differentiation.
5. #your argument is invalid #so stop trying to make it seem like white people have gone through the same shit as us #because they sure as hell haven’t
My argument is invalid. Really. The entire problem really, is how some US social justice bloggers plaster the label of “white” on the entirety of Europe when it makes utterly no sense at all to understanding the Holocaust, Bosnia, Serfdom in Russia, anti-Polish sentiment in the UK or the various faultlines and historical tensions that STILL exist despite the European Union.
Portugal, anti-austerity protests against Germany. Quite unfair to make Nazi comparisons, but that’s what a lot of European countries do when they are unhappy with Germany.
Homogenising experiences of “white people” (which in the US = European origin) globally to arrive at the conclusion that they haven’t “gone through as much shit as POC” doesn’t make much sense. It makes as much sense as me, a person with Chinese ancestry, somehow acting as though caste discrimination in India is part of my heritage or a claim to victimhood. Or me, the Han Chinese, saying “hey, we haven’t been oppressed much srsly” to the ethnic minorities in China like Uighur Muslim prevented from celebrating Ramadan by Beijing. It makes as much sense as plastering the label “black” uniformly over Africa to downplay ethnic violence like between Luo and Kikuyu in Kenya, or Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda as “political conflicts”. Just Asians oppressing other Asians! Africans hurting other Africans! There’s no difference at all, not like how ONE ethnic group is in the majority and possesses institutional power or something. Sure.
If you don’t think that logic is valid, then don’t act as though GLOBALLY, the oppression of specific European people is somehow counterbalanced by enormous “white privilege” in Western Europe or the US. Their experiences are not homogenous at all. The fact that the English don’t suffer systemic racism didn’t meant shit to the Bosnian getting murdered in the 1990s or the Ashkenazi Jewish person in the 1940s. Eastern Europe’s decades of human rights abuses under Communist rule had MORE IN COMMON to Latin America’s former dictatorships than wealthy Western Europe. The East German person’s experience right up till 1989 was very different from the West German’s.
So, you should think twice if you think the “white” victims like the Ukrainian survivor of the Holodomor famine orchestrated by Stalin, or a Bosnian who saw all male members of their family killed and female members gang-raped hasn’t “gone through the same shit” as you. Just because my family lived through European and Japanese imperialism doesn’t give me double victimisation points, and that MY story is more important. All stories are equally important. Because oppression is not a contest, because universal human rights, not the cesspool of humanity (“who has it WORST??!”), is the BENCHMARK. And yet these European victims’ stories are less important than talking about the oppression of only “POC”? Really, we should move away from this mentality of the Oppression Olympics.
Ukrainian victims during the Holodomor
It’s one thing to focus on racism you are most familiar with, one thing to not know everything about the outside world. It’s another to think you can impose your American narratives on the experiences of non-Americans, and tell me I am “anti social justice” for talking about the complexity of institutionalised discrimination outside the US. Which, sadly isn’t as simple as “white = oppressor” and “POC” = victim.
Some of the worst abuses in the past century aren’t even about skin tone or even necessarily racism, which this website honestly seems to forget because of how US-centric the discourse is.
